“Kevin, at the end of the day, I believe that this mandate was the wrong choice for the PUD and our community and wholly unnecessary. Ultimately it was your decision that put your work force in a compromising position, boxed in a corner and forced to make a choice they never should have been forced to make.”

Kurt Anderson,
former PUD Lineman

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T’was the night before Christmas, and all through the district…

Jefferson County Public Utility District employees and contractors got unwelcome surprises in their stockings this year—ultimatums, coercion, pink slips. The holiday mood around our little utility is far from merry and bright. Management’s extreme position on vaccine mandates has cost our PUD precious staff, loyal contractors and a great deal of good will, both inside the facility and out. As the winter storm season threatens, remaining linemen are concerned about power restoration and public safety.

Speaking under condition of anonymity, former and current line crew expressed deep frustration with management, this policy and its execution, particularly the dismissal of three* of their team at the worst possible time of year. “We have terminated quality hands for speaking their minds and/or not complying with the mandate.”

Fewer men will have to cover more work, which will impose unnecessary hazards on remaining linemen. They fear it will impact response time for outages.

In-house staff runs lean and the PUD relies on full-time contracted high-voltage crews to help handle all of our needs. Titan, the largest of these, was not interested in complying with the mandates. Now they will have to be replaced. Sources describe “a scramble to get line contractors” because the mandate is so unpopular “and not desired by the absolute majority.” The list of contractors who aren’t submitting their “attestation letters” is long indeed.  Documents obtained by the Free Press show that half of the PUD’s subs have refused to comply with the new mandate.

When the prospect of mandating Covid vaccines for all PUD employees was first publicly raised at the Oct. 4th commissioners meeting, numerous customer/owners wrote and Zoomed in to express their concerns, both for the employees and what it could mean for our service needs. As reported by the Free Press days later, not one of those concerns was addressed.

That article detailed how our PUD was exceeding what was required by Inslee’s mandate and recommended by WAPUDA (Washington Public Utility District Association). It also asked why two out of three elected PUD commissioners abrogated responsibility for such a significant policy decision. Commissioners Jeff Randall (District 1) and Ken Collins (District 2) avoided concerns raised by ratepayers, Citizen Advisory Board members and staff by cutting the discussion short. They sidestepped their policy role by directing General Manager Kevin Streett to make the call instead.

At the Dec. 14 meeting I asked how many PUDs in this state are following the hard line that ours has taken with the mandates, and how many are not mandating jabs at all? No one cared to respond to those questions. A week later, excavation contractor Marty Kithcart reached out to the Free Press, happy to answer those queries: Not one other Washington PUD is mandating jabs for jobs. Not one.

Kithcart and a buddy canvassed all state PUDs plus many others around the country, and they couldn’t find a single PUD enforcing these mandates. Why should any of the contractors mold their company policies to satisfy the demands of one small utility? GM Streett has claimed we implemented the mandate to be “compliant” with state orders. Why are no other PUDs afraid to be out of compliance? Don’t expect an answer.

The backlash from this mandate zealotry has potential to do real damage. It appears there were inconsistencies in the offering of weekly testing as an option. Some employees and contractors were given religious exemptions, others were told they could “not be granted accommodation.” Unfair labor practices would further expose the utility to litigation. Just about every day we hear of another huge employer walking back the mandates for whatever reasons—GM, 3M, Verizon, Amtrak, Cleveland Clinic, Advent Health and (last week) Boeing. Will those who were coerced to accept the jab to keep their job come after their employers? Who could blame them if they did?

The screen shot below shows the PUD’s roster of electrical staff before the mandate was announced by GM Streett in October. Even at that time the utility was short-staffed, advertising for additional Journeymen Linemen to fill out needed crews. “We’ve had a job posting for a lineman for almost 2 years unfilled,” one employee said. “We had three local linemen let go at a time when it is a struggle to find them.”

 

A veteran lineman responds to his termination

Someone high up the food chain decided that “terminations” were going to be re-labeled “separations” for Build Back Better times. Sounds softer, gentler. Separation is way better than divorce, right? Long-time lineman Kurt Anderson’s lengthy response to his termination is as raw as it is well-considered.

“Kevin Streett’s premise to go forward with a vaccine policy was quote ‘to be in compliance’ with Washington State Department of Transportation’s own policy. I believe this to be a false premise.”

“In my just shy of 7 years at the PUD when I have worked on state right of ways or projects I have not encountered any state workers in close proximity to the job site. If I was still employed by the PUD and should a situation arise where I encountered a state employee/s on the job site I do believe I could follow the CDC guidelines to achieve safe distancing…. If I could not maintain social distancing while working aloft, I would stay on the ground in a support role…. we have survived almost two whole years with the initial covid safety policy in place and I feel safe with it as it is.”

Terminating a long-time unvaxxed employee in a hard-to-fill critical position under the premise that he could be a safety hazard to a vaxxed state worker is beyond foolhardy for an already-understaffed small county utility. The premise doesn’t even hold water. Anderson has done his own research; his statements about the jab are factual:

“I would like to point out that as history plays out on covid-19 vaccines there is very little difference between a fully vaccinated person and a non vaccinated person, BOTH can get covid, BOTH can spread covid, BOTH can survive covid and BOTH can die from covid. The shot was not meant to stop the spread of covid, only to lessen the severity of symptoms and raise an individual’s chance of survival should they contract covid, secondarily to relieve pressure on hospitals.”

He goes on to highlight the indefensible posture assumed by authorities in the face of the spectacular failure of the jab policies, seen within his own workplace:

“One only has to look to the PUD roster to see this truth, after being fully vaccinated a PUD employee contracted covid. The fully vaccinated coworkers of this individual were allowed to continue working regular and overtime hours, the unvaccinated coworkers were sent home on unpaid time off for 10 days quarantine with the requirement to complete a covid test as directed by the county health department, option to use PTO [paid time off] allowed. Some online training classes were set up to help offset the unpaid time off.”

So vaxxed workers who are just as likely to contract and transmit Covid as the unvaxxed are given a free pass, while the “non-compliant” must quarantine and lose pay. The official response is to double down, forcing a punitive, duplicitous “solution” onto those who had nothing to do with the outbreak from the beginning.

“When speaking with many of my fellow PUD employees, regardless of their vaccine status, most felt the mandate was unprecedented and wrong… I believe many voices fell on deaf ears and the ones most affected were never heard at all.”

Anderson’s full letter to the PUD in response to his termination is here.

Losing half of the PUD’s contractors, too

Marty Kithcart has operated Landmark Excavation for over 30 years. For almost 5 years, he’s provided trenching and other infrastructure services and support for the PUD and its larger contracted outfits like Titan. And like Titan and other contractors who refused to go along with the mandates, Kithcart was just “separated” by our PUD—while he had two open contracts, and had purchased water main materials for the project that was awarded to him. He has three employees. They and their families depend on local work near where they live. He declined other work to honor those contracts.

Streett broke the PUD’s contracts even though Landmark had bid them in good faith prior to the mandate. The PUD told him they will reimburse him for those materials, but that’s small comfort for the four men who just lost these jobs. Will GM Streett replace them with a more “compliant” crew, one which perhaps uses religious exemptions? Or medical exemptions? How are those workers safe to be around, but Kithcart’s are not?

How many other contracts did the PUD breach midstream? It’s unlikely Landmark is the only one.

When Kithcart asked Streett about exemptions, he got a firm “no.” Then he bumped into another contractor who told him they got a religious exemption. Kithcart was told that his crew was not allowed into the PUD yard where contractor supplies are kept if everybody wasn’t jabbed. He contacted his District 2 Commissioner Collins to look for his reasoning for moving forward with this policy.

Collins eventually called to tell him if he had one “vaccinated” worker, that one man could access the yard and his company could continue to be a contractor. Then Kithcart was told by Operations Director Scott Bancroft that if everybody wasn’t jabbed, they can’t work on PUD projects. GM Streett told Kithcart the PUD would sever ties come December 20th. Mirroring the constantly shifting directives coming from the feds, even local authorities seem to be making it up as they go along, depending on the rolling ratio of compliance-to-pushback.

Kithcart told the Free Press that he’s shocked and angered that the PUD would take this singular and unpopular step at this most important time of year.

“This is the season of giving. How could they treat loyal employees and contractors this way? All of these workers get called out in the middle of the night in the worst kind of weather. Without complaint, we put our heads down and get the job done. We all help out where help is needed. For twenty months we’ve worked side by side with other crews without a problem, now all of a sudden we’re a threat?”

“These are all good people at heart,” Kithcart says of the GM and commissioners, “so why didn’t they think this through? I look for people in need and do what I can to make their life a little better. This is going the wrong way. How it is that the commissioners didn’t give serious consideration to what other PUDs are doing? How could they throw away all these long relationships with really good people?”

Kithcart was heartbroken by the firing of lineman Kurt Anderson. “You’ll never meet a nicer guy. He was so competent at his job.”

With the winter storm season approaching, and crushed Christmas and New Year’s plans for families devastated by unemployed breadwinners, he’s most concerned for those who have lost their jobs, and the many customer/owners for whom an extended power outage could prove fatal.

Kithcart’s wife, Sarah, was also just fired from her job of nearly 8 years as a Medical Assistant with Dr. Dimitri Kuznetsov, for declining the jab. Kuznetsov’s clinic was subsumed by Jefferson Healthcare a while back. Another Medical Assistant in the office, a 9-year veteran, then quit because Sarah was fired. Both their days were spent providing maintenance urological care.  Many of their patients will now have to turn to Jefferson Healthcare for these services. Think about that the next time you hear news reports about overwhelmed hospitals. The healthcare system is undergoing a controlled demolition.

The Kithcarts will be having a more solemn Christmas than usual, but they’re far more worried about what all this is doing to our community.

When is Coercion not Coercion?

Another question I raised at the Dec. 14 meeting was how many employees did not want to receive the Covid jabs, but relented in order to keep their jobs?

PUD counsel, Joel Paisner, spoke up:

“Before staff weighs in, I just wanted to say that some of that information is really confidential to the employee and I don’t think it would be appropriate to comment on the individual status of each employee… I’ll just say that… it’s a matter of opinion whether it was coercion or not, it’s not a factual matter.”

I asked for the total number of employees who took an unwanted jab to keep their job, not for personal details. Paisner’s red-herring response sounded awfully similar to health officer Allison Berry’s well-practiced sidesteps from providing evidence when asked for it.

Coercion is a matter of opinion, not a factual matter? In Kurt Anderson’s opinion, coercion is very much a factual matter. His letter continues to address GM Streett:

“In the October 4 meeting you stated you had spoken with a lot of your staff…”

“I was never asked how I felt about any of this ahead of your decision and I believe there are other PUD employees who were also left out… The injustice of what happened to them is shameful. When they were faced with the many challenges listed above, this group of employees choose [sic], against their will and got vaccinated to retain their job. This is defined as COERCION…”

Jefferson County residents voted to purchase this electric utility from Puget Sound Energy to gain local control of our power, and to provide living-wage jobs which also fortify the tax base. That control is in the hands of our elected PUD commissioners (BOC) who determine policy that the General Manager is charged to carry out. In the case of this Covid policy, two out of three commissioners not only shirked their responsibility to determine sensitive policy, they’ve made the situation worse because of a hiring policy they passed two years ago.

Despite arguments that we need as broad a pool of applicants as possible for difficult-to-fill positions like linemen, the BOC enacted policy restricting employment to Jefferson County residents only. Streett has now terminated specialized experienced local workers. Our county pool for these highly-skilled jobs is exhausted and even if there were lineman available elsewhere, policy prohibits hiring staff outside Jefferson County unless they relocate. New hires who may have been willing to commute, from Port Angeles or Kitsap for example, must move here for employment.

We’ve already seen how difficult it is to procure trained linemen. Do you think a lineman with a good job and no mandate is likely to jump ship for a PUD with the most onerous policy in the state, where housing is in short supply?

Or will we be hiring out-of-county contractors to replace the local workers we just fired? Will both of these ill-advised policies now have to be rescinded (further exposing the PUD to legal action) in order to keep the lights and heat on?

District 1 Commissioner Jeff Randall’s seat is up for election next autumn. Talk is that he will have an opponent. The fallout from his support for the disastrous mandate policy will be verdant pasture for a challenger.

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About as far away as you can get from JeffCo on this continent, Gainesville, Florida attorney Jeff Childers successfully challenged and won an injunction to shut down a “vaccinate or terminate” policy that the city was attempting to enforce. The director of their utility begged them not to do it, arguing that he “couldn’t guarantee safe and efficient operation of the utility if I lose that many people.” Like our PUD, the city charged ahead. The presiding judge sided with the utility and 250 other plaintiffs in the case, and stopped the mandate in its tracks.

JeffCo PUD customer/owners may not be so blessed. Successful lawsuits against our little public utility may haunt ratepayers for a very long time, even as extended outages amid staffing shortages bedevil us this winter.

• Errata:  GM Streett stated at the Jan. 4 meeting that only two line crew were lost due to the mandate.